Anthropomorphics / Metaperson

The title Anthropomorphics does not mean the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things. It means the grammar of the human figure — the rules that determine how persons are generated, constituted, and sustained through their participation in scenes. This grammar is "originary" in the precise sense: it derives from the originary scene, which is the scene of human constitution itself.

The constituted subject. The deepest challenge to modern anthropology is the challenge to the category of the individual. Liberal political theory — and most social theory — begins with the individual as a pre-given unit: persons with desires, interests, rights, and identities who then enter social relations. Center Study inverts this picture. The person is not prior to the scene but produced by it. The subject who says this on the originary scene is constituted by that very act of pointing — the mimetic pressure, the shared attention, the sacred binding. There is no subject before the scene; there is only the scene, and the subject is its product.

The metaperson. The metaperson is the individual understood as a center in its own right — as someone who can be addressed by the center, who can embody the center's authority in a specific domain. The emergence of the metaperson is the emergence of individuality as a post-sacrificial possibility: the recognition that each person is potentially a center, potentially a locus of the sacred's authority, and therefore not to be sacrificed. This recognition is the specific moral contribution of the Christian revelation as Center Study reads it.

Pedagogy as fundamental. Katz argues that pedagogy is "the most fundamental human relation." The constituted subject is always constituted through instruction — through the transmission of practices, concepts, and orientations from those who have them to those who do not. This means that the master-student relation is not incidental to human development but constitutive of it. Every scene of education is a scene of constitution: the student becomes capable of new orientations by orienting toward a teacher who models them.

Originary grammar. The grammar implicit in the originary scene is not the grammar of any particular language but the grammar of signification itself — the rules for how signs work, how scenes are constituted, how attention is directed and maintained. Katz's project in Anthropomorphics is to make this grammar explicit: to identify the minimal rules that govern all human meaning-production, from the originary sign to contemporary institutional discourse.

The individual as artifact. Katz agrees with C.A. Bond's Jouvenelian analysis: the modern individual is not a natural social unit but an artifact created through specific power dynamics — particularly the dissolution of intermediate institutions by final power centers seeking to consolidate authority. The "individual" is a product of specific historical processes, not a metaphysical given. This does not mean individuals are not real; it means that their reality is scenic and relational, not autonomous and pre-given.